Big Pimpin wrote:It's long been known that certain metrics (UZR especially) has had problems with LF in Fenway (and Enron/Minute Maid) because of the wall. And like I said before, I agree that we can't have complete confidence in any one number. But if you take other systems and multiple years and look at the entirety of the data and then put a range around it, I think you can be pretty confident in the result.

For instance, I may not agree that Manny is a -18 LF because that's his UZR number for 2007, but if I look at UZR and PMR and Chone (I didn't, I'm just making this argument) and come to the conclusion that he's roughly a -15 LF then I maybe I can reasonably think he's a -10 to -20 LF. Knowing the problems with Fenway and wanting being conservative, I would probably value him as a -5 to -15 LF. I guess my own personal opinion is simply that the defensive data and information is very useful, even if one particular metric or year or whatever isn't completely 100% reliable.

Yes, but to go from "this is useful" to "this definitely proves the Bradley + RP is more valuable than Dunn" is a bit of a stretch no?

Forgetting about what the stats say, I think you could also argue that defensive stats are meaningless for Bradley. He only played 20 games in the outfield last year, and he hasn't spent significant amounts of time in CF since 2005. He's suffered injuries every year since then. His admittedly stellar offensive output last year was as a DH. He's never matched it while playing a lot in the outfield. I think there's plenty of reason to be skeptical of relying on Bradley, and I think there's plenty reason to wonder how good he is defensively at this point in his career. He is of course way better than Dunn, but exactly how much better and what it means for value is very much in question IMO.

Big Pimpin wrote:It's long been known that certain metrics (UZR especially) has had problems with LF in Fenway (and Enron/Minute Maid) because of the wall. And like I said before, I agree that we can't have complete confidence in any one number. But if you take other systems and multiple years and look at the entirety of the data and then put a range around it, I think you can be pretty confident in the result.

For instance, I may not agree that Manny is a -18 LF because that's his UZR number for 2007, but if I look at UZR and PMR and Chone (I didn't, I'm just making this argument) and come to the conclusion that he's roughly a -15 LF then I maybe I can reasonably think he's a -10 to -20 LF. Knowing the problems with Fenway and wanting being conservative, I would probably value him as a -5 to -15 LF. I guess my own personal opinion is simply that the defensive data and information is very useful, even if one particular metric or year or whatever isn't completely 100% reliable.

Yes, but to go from "this is useful" to "this definitely proves the Bradley + RP is more valuable than Dunn" is a bit of a stretch no?

Forgetting about what the stats say, I think you could also argue that defensive stats are meaningless for Bradley. He only played 20 games in the outfield last year, and he hasn't spent significant amounts of time in CF since 2005. He's suffered injuries every year since then. His admittedly stellar offensive output last year was as a DH. He's never matched it while playing a lot in the outfield. I think there's plenty of reason to be skeptical of relying on Bradley, and I think there's plenty reason to wonder how good he is defensively at this point in his career. He is of course way better than Dunn, but exactly how much better and what it means for value is very much in question IMO.

To be fair, I really didn't set out to prove that, it was a byproduct of "there's no way in hell 100 games of Bradley and 160 of Dunn are comparable" and I'm still confident I proved that. In fact I was surprised and just how much better Bradley rated. Anyway, it's especially true if Bradley's replacement is those 60 games is actually a guy who's pretty close to league average like Fukudome.

I also assumed significant offensive regression for Bradley (well I didn't, but James and Marcel did ). I think you're right about not knowing what Bradley's true defensive ability is, but I think there's as many questions about Dunn. Dunn rated very poorly last year, is that his true talent level? Is he fading as he gets older? Those things are very possible but weren't included in the numbers because I averaged the past 4 years.

Anyway, I didn't want to do a range and I didn't want to take the time to look at PMR because I didn't have the time, but I'm pretty confident that if I had I would have still found them pretty comparable in the same analysis.

Big Pimpin wrote:It's long been known that certain metrics (UZR especially) has had problems with LF in Fenway (and Enron/Minute Maid) because of the wall. And like I said before, I agree that we can't have complete confidence in any one number. But if you take other systems and multiple years and look at the entirety of the data and then put a range around it, I think you can be pretty confident in the result.

For instance, I may not agree that Manny is a -18 LF because that's his UZR number for 2007, but if I look at UZR and PMR and Chone (I didn't, I'm just making this argument) and come to the conclusion that he's roughly a -15 LF then I maybe I can reasonably think he's a -10 to -20 LF. Knowing the problems with Fenway and wanting being conservative, I would probably value him as a -5 to -15 LF. I guess my own personal opinion is simply that the defensive data and information is very useful, even if one particular metric or year or whatever isn't completely 100% reliable.

I think the larger problem that the Manny problem illustrates is that there is wide variation in evaluating even the same player over relatively short time periods or in different parks. There are several possible explanations for that:

The latter two seem unlikely, given the size of the variations and the fact that most players make 70-80 percent or more of the plays in their zone.

Which suggest that a lot of the variation we see within players has nothing to do with defensive ability...which should lead to the conclusion that it is also likely that the range that you have to draw around the defensive measures for individual players is quite large.

At this point, I think we are unable to say much more than that a player is below average, average, or above average with any good degree of confidence.

"I don't want to play golf. When I hit a ball, I want someone else to chase it."

I was wondering if anyone has an update on his situation. Maybe someone from the west coast hear anything on the radio or local blogs?

Does this change your thoughts on him for all of you early drafters out there? If he slips, I am wondering where he would need to fall to for me to grab him, as usually the train of thought is to stay away from SPs until a little later in the draft. But, with the top tier, and next tier for that matter, of SPs growing, I don't know how much this affects it for me. Thoughts?